SoFA : A Distributed File System for Search-Oriented Systems

A Distributed File System (DFS) provides a mechanism in which a file can be stored across several physical computer nodes ensuring replication transparency and failure transparency. Applications that process large volumes of data (such as, search engines, grid computing applications, data mining applications, etc.) require a backend infrastructure for storing data. And the distributed file system is the central component for such storing data infrastructure. There have been many projects focused on network computing that have designed and implemented distributed file systems with a variety of architectures and functionalities. In this paper, we describe a complete distributed file system which can be used in large-scale search-oriented systems.